Was the Golden Age of American Jewry Real?

As antisemitism surges and American Jews are experiencing insecurities about their life in America that they have not felt for decades, questions have arisen about whether America was quite the Goldene Medina – golden country – that was portrayed for 60 years between 1910 and 1970. This is not a mere theoretical matter but one that has direct impact on how we approach the negative turn that is today’s reality. 

Clearly, on the face of it, Jewish life changed for the better with the arrival of the civil rights revolution in the 1950s and 1960s, with the impact of the Holocaust on Americans’ views of Jews, and the general opening up of American society.  

Before the war, while Jewish life in America was obviously better than anything Europe presented, there were significant limits on true freedom and normalcy for American Jews. Most significantly, Jews had hesitations in many settings from showing their true selves and identity. Whether it was in education, the business world, the military or other forms of daily life, stories often appeared of Jews being singled out for discrimination or ridicule that often led them to conceal who they truly were. And unofficial discrimination was a characteristic embodied by unspoken quotas at major universities on the number of Jews admitted. Harvard was particularly egregious in this respect, and when the reality of the quotas became public there was both shock but also recognition that Harvard was hardly alone in treating Jews differently. 

And so when the 1960s arrived and Jews started to feel more comfortable in their own skin, a significant and obvious change took place in the willingness of Jews to publicly identify who they really were. In so many settings, Jews took pride in their identity. Rather than hiding who they were, stories of Jews reveling in their Jewish families, Jewish history, and Judaism as a religion. One symptom of this change was seeing men all over the country appearing in public wearing yarmulkes, something that was largely unheard of previously. Being Jewish, rather than being seen as an albatross, was now seen as a virtue. And it translated into huge accomplishments in many fields of endeavor. 

Having said that, there is no doubt that historic antisemitic attitudes had never completely left America. In ADL opinion polls, we found that whereas in 1969, 29 percent of Americans had antisemitic attitudes, by 1994 that number had dropped to twelve percent. And it went even lower in subsequent polls.  But it never reached zero. 

There is much evidence of continuing antisemitism and conspiracies about Jews in this period. Names like Gerald K. Smith and others come up, appropriately. But what was significantly different for American Jews, unlike the past, was that these haters were mostly on the margins of society, whereas, in the past, Jews experienced antisemitism in their everyday lives. And again, this change led Jews to become so comfortable that they overall felt they could show their Jewishness in many settings without any danger or discomfit. 

All of which suggests that it is not far-fetched to describe those decades as a golden age as long as one does not suggest that antisemitism had completely disappeared, which it had not, and as long as one does not suggest, as some did, that America had fundamentally changed and antisemitism would no longer be a problem for Jews going forward. 

All of which should lead to a conclusion that does not deny the continued existence of antisemitism in this period, but also acknowledges that Jewish life, while not guaranteeing future continuity, had reached a comfort level unprecedented in America and in the two-thousand-year history of the diaspora. 

This should encourage us to believe that the country is not stuck in its current surge of Jew hatred and there is a lot to look back at to guide us in developing strategies to combat that hatred. But also it instructs us never to fall into the trap of thinking that challenges to a good life are ever permanently gone. Maintaining a keen eye for threats as well as a receptivity to improvement is just the right combination that will sustain us going forward.